Mass Shootings Haven’t Changed the Gun-Control Debate

The U.S. Capitol is blocked off after the shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise and four others during a baseball game in Virginia.

Photograph by Eric Thayer / Bloomberg / Getty

On the morning of December 14, 2012, when a gunman opened fire inside
Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, I was in eastern
Pennsylvania, reporting on child poverty for the Times. Because I had
previously spent the better part of a year writing investigative
stories on gaps in gun laws, my bosses quickly summoned me back to the office.
I’d reported on my share of mass shootings, from the massacre at
Virginia Tech, in 2007, to the one outside a supermarket in Tucson,
Arizona, in 2011, that left Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords severely
wounded. I remember thinking, on my drive back to New York City, that this
one, the shooting of six- and seven-year-olds, would finally alter the
gun-control debate in this country. I thought about the possibilities
for change again on Wednesday morning, after hearing the news about the
shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise, the majority whip, and four
others, at a baseball field in suburban Virginia.

Writing and reporting about gun control inevitably makes you cynical
about the political process. After Newtown, I tried to focus my work on
issues that I thought people would find easy to agree on: keeping guns
from domestic
abusers and people with histories of serious mental
illness;
preventing accidental gun deaths among
children;
making it harder for felons to purchase guns on the
Internet.
But real policy changes, the kind that investigative reporters often
measure their work by, were elusive. The gun-control debate trundled on
much as before.

In April, 2013, four months after the Newtown shooting, a gun-control
compromise put together by Senators Joe Manchin, a Democrat, and Pat
Toomey, a Republican, went down in defeat in the Senate. The measure
would have expanded background checks for firearms purchases at gun
shows and on the Internet. Despite President Obama’s vigorous lobbying
for the measure, five Democrats joined forty-one Republicans in voting
against it, denying it the sixty votes it needed to get through the
Senate. Two years later, a day after fourteen people were killed in a
shooting San Bernardino, California, the measure came up for another
vote. Again, it was defeated.

I was as surprised as anyone when gun control became a pivot point in
the Democratic Presidential primary. Hillary Clinton assailed Bernie
Sanders over his 2005 vote to limit liability for gun manufacturers when
their firearms were used in crimes. Clinton went on to make gun control
central to her general-election campaign. After years of treading
carefully on guns, Democratic officials embraced the issue. On Election
Day, voters in several states approved ballot initiatives to tighten gun
laws. Advocacy groups such as Everytown for Gun Safety—which is financed
by the billionaire and former New Yorker City Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg—have also managed to scratch out victories in recent years in
statehouses across the country. Oregon, for instance, passed a law in
2015 requiring background checks on private gun sales. It is reason for
hope. But, if past mass shootings are any guide, today’s events won’t
alter the debate on an issue that, as much as any other, reflects the
state of political polarization in this country.